Exhausted workers / good work

Left/top: Bernie Sanders has been a principled human and a pragmatic politician for decades. Sometimes these two aspects conflict, but largely—far more largely than for most in his profession—principles have won out. I’ve followed him since he ran for mayor of Burlington, VT, in 1981, when someone had to wake him up the day after voting to let him know he had unexpectedly won … by 10 votes.

Back then he doggedly, and often dogmatically, viewed the world through a pure Marxist filter: Women’s rights, race, immigration, the environment were simply subsets of class struggle. To the point that I once had a screaming match with him at a demonstration in front of a General Electric plant in Burlington. The factory was manufacturing gatling guns for export to El Salvador, where a murderous regime used them to mow down troublesome peasants. Mayor Sanders opposed the US-backed war, but supported producing guns in Burlington since it meant good jobs for his constituent workers. And if the local plant stopped production, he argued, the lucrative government contract would just go elsewhere.

I wonder if Bernie would defend that position today. Certainly, he has evolved over the years to see how many complex social and political problems intersect with, but are not subsumed by, the issue of class. And now he is trying to mark out a principled and pragmatic position on Israel/Palestine.

No wonder the man looks exhausted.

Below: During El Salvador’s bloody 1989 "final offensive," the US-backed regime, with help from those Vermont-made gatling guns, defeated the rebels and eliminated the threat of democracy and rights. Here, an exhausted Salvadoran medic takes a break from his devastating work.